


Untouchable

by Pemm



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 14:50:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7645279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pemm/pseuds/Pemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scout had largely been under the impression that respawn fixed everything, and largely he had been right. “Largely,” however, did not take into account things like sabotage. Pyro had been the first one to go through the immortality cycle after the BLU spy snuck in and did something to their respawn machine, and he’d paid for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untouchable

**Author's Note:**

> A quick flashfire bit I put on Tumblr about a year back and forgot to ever put here! Some interpersonal relationship drama, with a side of smut.

Scout had largely been under the impression that respawn fixed everything, and largely he had been right. “Largely,” however, did not take into account things like sabotage. Pyro had been the first one to go through the immortality cycle after the BLU spy snuck in and did something to their respawn machine, and he’d paid for it.

Pyro had come back _wrong_ , Engineer had said, and at first had refused to tell Scout more, even as Medic was baying for extra hands in the infirmary. It had taken twenty minutes of begging and Demoman taking Engineer aside for Scout to get anywhere. Everyone on the team knew Scout and Pyro were close; not many of them knew how close. Scout found he didn’t care if that number had grown after Demo had spoken to Engie. All he cared about was that he was allowed in after Medic had done what he could.

It was—it was bad. Pyro had been unconscious, and later Scout would thank whatever God was listening that he had been.

_“Th–that thing ain’t—that ain’t the Pyro. No way.”_

It was a thing he could remember hearing himself say, but more clearly than that he could remember the way his teammates had looked at him when he said it, after scrambling out of the room. Sympathy, some. Mostly hard-to-read expressions. But Heavy had looked at him in disgust, and later Soldier had personally marched him outside and chewed him out. At the time Scout had hated him for it, as much as he hated himself for what he’d said. But he’d deserved it.

The thing that was not Pyro had been a lot of raw, charred skin, his eyebrows and a good chunk of his gorgeous black curls burned off and one of his ears gone entirely. In the fifteen seconds Scout had looked at him he’d noticed that the third and fourth fingers of his left hand had been melted together. Someone told him it had been an explosion, and that respawn had sent him back exactly the way he’d died, but just made him alive again. It had done this five or six times before anyone found him. Scout couldn’t remember who’d told him that.

The Gravel Wars were suspended while the machine was fixed, and while RED looked for a replacement for Pyro. They found one, some nobody. He wasn’t even half as good as the real Pyro. (The one that wasn’t Pyro.)

The real Pyro healed. The medigun still worked on him, but at a vastly reduced rate. It was a month before he could walk. It was two more before he could speak again.

Everyone knew Scout was avoiding him—had only gone to see him once after that first time—but no one said anything.

He started spending a lot of time up on the water tower near the base. A year ago he’d taken Pyro up here and told him for the first time that he loved him. He tried not to think about that.

Time passed. Medic, driven more by a desire to conquer death than to heal Pyro, found a way to accelerate the healing, and a little less than a week after he’d spoken again for the first time Pyro was back to normal. Just … normal. No scars, nothing. The replacement Pyro left. Medic declared it a success and instantly forgot about it, and Scout still found himself avoiding his closest teammate.

Perhaps now they were only teammates.

To his credit he was the one that tracked Pyro down, got him to talk to him. It was easier with Pyro looking like himself again, and the realization sent pangs of guilt through Scout’s chest as they muddled their way through conversation. It seemed like it took him too long to realize why the conversation felt wrong, and it was more than just their prolonged silence.

Pyro hesitated in everything he said. He was drawn inward, he avoided eye contact. He held the third and fourth fingers of his left hand together and seemed surprised every time he realized they were two separate entities.

They talked and said they were so glad to see each other again, and _I love you_ and _I love you too,_ and awkward, painful smiles were exchanged. They did not even get close enough to touch, let alone kiss. Scout left feeling as though he needed to vomit.

Pyro had come back, Scout thought to himself, but he’d come back _wrong._

Six months passed. The wound between them seemed to begin to knit. Eventually Scout could look Pyro in the eye again, though it was rarely returned. By now, of course, everyone knew about them; no one apparently cared. Scout weaseled his way into Pyro’s bed and let himself pretend things were back to normal.

He found out rapidly that that wasn’t going to work. The first time he tried to kiss Pyro after the accident he was told, in Pyro’s rough and ragged voice, to fuck off. When Scout pressed he was kicked out of Pyro’s room. Bewildered and pissed off, he didn’t try to talk to him again for a week.

This time it was Pyro that came to him. “I’m sorry, Scout, I am,” he said, and it struck Scout that he’d never seen Pyro this close to tears before. Pyro didn’t cry. Pyro laughed at everything, Pyro was unflappable, Pyro didn’t _cry._ “I just—I don’t … after the, the accident …”

“Don’t what, don’t want nothin’ to do with me?”

“…That was you,” Pyro said, or Scout thought that was what he said. Low, tight, under his breath. But when Scout told him to speak up he just said, “It, no. I just—I’m better, I know I am, but I still … _feel_ like I’m not, like I’m still burned up.” He swallowed. “Untouchable.”

Ah. There was that guilt again.

The chance was there, was set before him. Scout could have fixed things then and there, or that was what he told himself later that night as he buried his nose against Pyro’s neck. Apologized, like he knew he should have long ago, and taken whatever that got him.

But he’d just said, “Oh.”

Scout was beginning to hate himself a little bit.

So he had a boyfriend. He had a boyfriend he’d avoided for over three months because he couldn’t stand to look at him all fucked up, and when he could stand to look at him again, his boyfriend wasn’t the same person. Well. _Was,_ but … different. Sniper said it was something called “combat stress reaction,” maybe, and Engineer had just said that things like that change a man.

Scout had to wonder if maybe Pyro wouldn’t have changed if Scout had just spent some fucking time with him.

This went on. The sex was non-existent, though they’d worked back up to kissing. Scout started trying to be alone as little as possible; it was easier to fight back the suffocating guilt like that.

It was, to the day, a year after Pyro had first been sent back wrong that it all blew up. Scout knew he was drinking too much, that night after dinner. He decided he didn’t care, and clumsily pulled Pyro outside with him to look at the infinite miles of stars sprawling above the Badlands.

“‘M sorry,“ he said after infinite minutes of still-uncomfortable small talk. ”I, I am. About—about you, I mean, an’, uh. Fuck. About what I did. Didn’t. Didn’t do.”

Pyro had long eyelashes and brown eyes that were full of a confusion that made Scout want to crawl into a hole and die. “What?”

“Fuckin‘, Pyro, I mean about what happened an’ all, with you an’ respawn and—and how I didn’t come fuckin’ just _be_ there for you like I shoulda been but weren’t on account’a I am a real actual fuckin’ piece’a shit, an’ about how it took me a fuckin‘—God-damn fuckin’ _year_ to even _say_ sorry an’ I—an’ just ‘m sorry about how I’m a real shit boyfriend.“ Scout was not sure when he’d begun choking on his words. ”An’ I’m tryin’ to fix it now an’ if you don’t want nothin’ more t’do with me s’fine, it’s, good. You shouldn’t oughta. I am a real piece’a work.”

Pyro was so quiet and so still for so long that after a while Scout began to wonder if he hadn’t brought the entire world to a standstill with his confession. Finally, though, there came a sound that at first he thought was the wind wailing through a canyon, or one of the creatures of the New Mexican nights keening in the dark, but—no, it was only Pyro, with a horrible kind of sigh rattling through his ribs. “You kind of are,” he agreed, in a voice that was agony to listen to. “You—it’s okay. I mean—it’s not okay, what you did, it, it _hurt_ , Scout—”

“—I know, I know an’ I’m sorry an’ I’m sorry I had to get fuckin’ drunk t’tell you that—”

“—I thought you never w, wanted to see me again, I thought you’d abandoned me, I _still_ feel like that and God _damn_ it why did you do that to me? Scout? I love you, why the fuck did you do that to me?”

None of the answers that came to Scout were good enough to say, so he said nothing. There in the dark he could feel Pyro’s stare burning a hole straight into him, a horrible flame that ate at him from the inside, until Pyro choked or gasped or died somewhere deep inside of himself for a second time, and ran past him back to the base. Scout did not so much as turn to look after him.

He did not see Pyro for three days. When asked, no one else on the team had seen him either. Not even Miss Pauling could tell him where Pyro had gone.

Of course he found Pyro up on the water tower at nearly midnight. It looked like maybe he’d slept there, with the thick blanket thrown over the catwalk like a sorry excuse for a bed. Scout didn’t ask; Scout didn’t say anything as he pulled himself up, and counted himself lucky that Pyro didn’t push him off the catwalk as he came up to him.

He sat down. A respectful distance away, of course. And he sat and he was still and he waited, and he hated every second of it, and he wished Pyro would just tell him they were over already, when Pyro said (his voice tiny and weak and exhausted), “I still love you.”

“…Me, um, me too.”

“Are you just saying that?”

“N—”

“Are you _sure_?”

Scout bit down on his tongue. He tried doing that thing the rest of the team was always telling him he should do, the thing where you slowed down and looked and listened instead of talking and moving and going. He looked at how Pyro was slouched over the guard rail, at his dark skin and at how his black hair sat tousled and frazzled over his face. He had a birthmark over his left cheekbone that Scout thought looked like a flying gull, and one of his pupils wasn’t quite all the way round, and under the thick chemsuit he wore even now Scout still remembered every inch of him.

And he remembered the burned, blackened _thing_ that had not been Pyro in the infirmary bed, alive yet dead, and this time he forced himself to think: _that was Pyro too._

And he decided:

“I love you.”

His mouth was the desert around them. Swallowing poured sand down his throat. Through the millions of tiny grains he choked out, a third time all told now, “I love you, Pyro.”

Pyro did not cry. But the argument could be made that neither did Scout. He certainly wasn’t crying now; the damp on his face was condensation off the night air. So, of course, the light that shone wetly off Pyro’s cheeks was simply a trick of the moon, and the drop of water that fell from his chin as he smiled at Scout was a lone lost raindrop.

They’d worked their way back up to kissing. When Scout got to his feet and stumbled over to the blanket Pyro sat on he was pulled down to sit beside him, and he leaned into the hand Pyro put against his face. “I,” Pyro started, stopped, tried again. “I forgive you.”

“S’not okay, is it.”

“It’s more okay than it was before.”

“Can I kiss you?”

He could, and did. Pyro tasted terrible, he’d definitely spent the night up here, but Scout doubted he tasted much better. And one kiss became two, and three, until he was pawing at the hidden zipper in the suit, his other hand buried in Pyro’s hair. _I love you, I love you. I’m sorry. Thank you. I love you._ “Is this okay? Can I—I, is it …”

Pyro pulled him closer, slipping a hand up Scout’s shirt. In another minute he’d lost the shirt entirely, was helping Pyro out of his chemsuit, was wondering if you could see the tower catwalk from the base. Deciding, as Pyro guided his hand to his bare thigh, that he didn’t give a shit.

Kisses. He felt a hand on his zipper and moaned, leaning deeper into Pyro. Pyro returned it in kind, fingers questing, finding what they wanted, cupping, stroking.

And Scout, suddenly mindful, pulled back. “It’s okay? Is—I mean— you still feelin’ un—untouchable?”

Pyro was flushed in the face, panting. “Yes,” he said, “but this time it’s because no one can stop me.”

The next thing Scout knew he’d been pushed back onto the blanket and his pants were being wrestled off, shoes cast aside. Pyro straddled his hips and ground down, just a little, just enough to make Scout close his eyes. They were open again in a second as he felt Pyro slide down to lie beside him, watching expectantly. Didn’t have to tell him twice; he was fumbling with Pyro’s boxers a moment later, shucking them off, resisting the temptation to throw them off the side of the catwalk—doing it anyway. “Hey! I need those—”

“Not right now y’don’t,” Scout said, spitting on his hand and getting to work. Pyro gasped, bucked, whined as Scout leaned in to steal his lips again.

Silence but for the desert air and Pyro’s growing whimpers and the slick persistent sound of Scout’s hand. “ _Fuck,_ ” he heard Pyro say against his mouth, and, “Oh, _God,_ yes,” and then no words at all but a strangled groan as he came. Scout felt it on his fingers, hot and wet, a signal flare straight through his core that had him short of breath as he watched Pyro writhe.

It would wait. It would wait. As the moment passed, as Pyro’s arched back collapsed again to the floor of the catwalk, Scout pressed another kiss to his forehead and shivered as he felt Pyro clutch at his sides.

He remembered again the burned thing in the hospital bed, and decided that he would love that Pyro, too.


End file.
